跨文化交际

课程名称：跨文化交际

学生姓名：潘颖

学号：20090162

指导老师：雷蕾

日期：2011年6月14日

High-context and Low-context

We human are used to living in groups. Communication is a necessary tool for us to transmit information in our everyday life. Culture determines our communicating styles. So in different cultures, the way we communicate can be quite different. And one factor which causes the differences is the different use of context.

So, what is context?

According to Hall, context is the information that surrounds an event, and bounds up with the meaning of the event. As far as I am concerned, context plays a very important role in communication. It makes the nature of the conversation more clear so that the listeners can get the information more easily. Just like we can not make a romantic proposal without a good atmosphere, we can not communicate successfully without context.

How many types does context include?

In general, context is categorized into two types—high-context and low-context. And this classification is made based on the degree to which meaning comes from the settings or from the words being exchanged.

As its name suggests, high-context means context counts a high percentage of the whole communication or message. In high-context communications, speakers always pay more attention to contexts than contents. They express their thoughts in a euphemistic way. So listeners’understanding is guided by their own feelings rather than the words they hear. The information transmitted by this kind of communication or message may differ with listeners changing.

While low-context is just the opposite. In low-context communications, speakers use little context, they prefer sending their message directly to saying a lot of words no matter whether they are related to the point or not. So the listeners can avoid some misunderstanding caused by too many contexts.

Native Americans, Latin Americans, Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans all belong to high-context cultures. In these countries, people are accustomed to communicating in a high-context way. They transmit information not only with the help of speech and words, they get the point more from the settings and the environment. That is to say the key point is either in the context or internalized in the person. So in high-context cultures, words are not the main access to getting information, those

high-context civilized people are educated to speak euphemistically and avoid direct expressions as much as possible since they are little children, so they are sensitive to the subtle surroundings such as space, gestures, dresses, the style of speaking and even silence，which can offer them information. People from this kind of culture have close relationships and they have much linguistic information to share with each other. Some abundant and profound meanings are always hidden in the simple information. Living in these societies, people are more willing to be harmony with others than committing conflicts.

Germans, Americans, Swiss, Swedes, Canadians, Norwegians, Finns and Danes belong to low-context cultures. In these cultures, time is extremely precious and people there attach great importance to detailed plans and accurate schedules. It is their views on time that shapes the way they communicate. They care much more about the words they hear than the settings around them so that they often show the point they are trying to make without many contexts. The nature of their talk can be clear through the sentences, the pronunciations, the intonation and the body languages. Only little information is implicit. In this way, communicators do not need to guess what others want to express indeed. Since actual words play most parts of low-context conversations, the contexts and anything about the speakers do not have many influences on messages transmitting.

Let’s see two typical examples of these countries which have different context culture.

1. The representative country of high-context culture---- China.

China is a typical country which has high-context culture. From the five-thousand-year history, we can know that our country has been advocating unification all the time. And we not only emphasize the unification of our territory but also the unification of our thoughts. That is the reason why we Chinese regard collectivism as our common value. In this kind of society, people are very homogeneous and used to depending on collectivity. So, they always think more about others’feelings than their own when getting along with others. When they communicate with people, they would rather say some words that have implicit meanings than point out their purposes directly. They think it a good way to care about others and avoid embarrassments which can be made by direct expressions.

2. The representative country of low-context culture---- America.

As we all know, America is a young country which just has less than 300-year history, there